At the recent Ecobuild conference, architect Ellen Dunham-Jones spoke about how some suburban shopping malls in the United States are changing into green community spaces. Juliet Heller reports

With much of the suburban landscape in the United State now aging, architect Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia, says there is an opportunity to re-develop and re-invent malls and business parks into green and “walk-able” spaces.

The carbon footprint in suburbs is three times bigger than in cities. People in the suburbs depend on fossil fuels, particularly oil, and there are public health issues also emerging. For instance, obesity from the sedentary lifestyle is leading to heart disease and diabetes.

There has also been a surprising demographic shift: it looks as if around two-thirds of suburban households will no longer have children. Increasingly the suburbs is populated by retirees and young professionals, so the needs and demands of these spaces are changing accordingly.

By greening the landscape with trees, greening the transport system to reduce car use, and redesigning the buildings to be more comfortable and efficient, the areas are being transformed, and others are following their example.

You can watch Ellen Dunham-Jones's TED talk on retrofitting suburbia

Now the Baftas are over, the movie industry turns its mind to the Oscars. There's one movie in the running that highlights the damage to the environment done by "fracking". Gloria Dawson reports.

When we talk about polluting fossil fuels, coal and oil are cited as the villains. Coal wins the prize for producing the most CO2 when burnt, as well as heavy particulates which cause ‘black soot’ in the polar regions and respiratory disease. Oil, meanwhile, gets a bad press not only because of its carbon intensity, but more recently for the Gulf of Mexico accident, and for the extraordinarily environmentally destructive project to extract bitumen from soils of Northern Canada.

Gas is often thought of as the ‘least worst’ option – plentiful, easy and relatively sustainable to extract and lower-carbon. However, Josh Fox’s documentary, ‘Gasland’, nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar last month, has begun to change this.

Fox began the film when his family was offered $100,000 for permission to drill for gas on their land. The gas company was proposing to use hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, where millions of gallons of chemically-laced water are pumped at high pressure into the ground, causing the rock to fracture and natural gas to be released, which can then be stored.

The U.S. Secretary of State for Energy, Steven Chu, gave a speech at the National Press Club yesterday, in which he warned that "time is running out" in the race for clean energy technologies.

Dr Chu said that America may face another "Sputnik moment". In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first earth-orbiting space satellite.

A Nobel prize-winning physicist, Dr Chu believes that China and the E.U. may take the lead in clean energy technologies.

"Given the enormous economic opportunities in clean energy, it's time for America to do what we do best: innovate."

Is Greensburg, a Republican-voting town in Kansas, where many people are sceptical of climate science, actually the greenest town in the world?

On May 4, 2007, Greensburg, Kansas, was destroyed by an F5 tornado. Almost every building in town was leveled. Eleven were killed, dozens injured. Yet within days, the people of Greensburg had committed to rebuild their town, and to rebuild green. Today, Greensburg is the greenest town in the USA, and maybe the world.

More.

Pic: Greensburg Community Art Center (H-t: Inhabitat)